Read Online A Wild and Lonely Place by Marcia Muller - Free Book Online Page A

dreamily. “There’s no rule
     about the booze, of course. I can have all I want, as long as I behave and stay in my room.”
    “Behave how?”
    “Oh, don’t wander into one of her damn dinner parties and start talking to somebody important. Don’t ask to see Habiba except
     during her hour. I’m a bad influence on her, you know.”
    “Do you really believe that?”
    “Oh, yes, I must be.”
    “So that’s what you do—stay here in your room most of the time?”
    “If I want the booze, I do. And I do—want the booze, I mean.”
    “What about Habiba’s father? What does he have to say about all this?”
    Her still smiling lips pulled down and her eyes sparked with anger. “Dave-the-magnificent? You see any signs of a man around
     here?”
    “No.”
    “That’s because Dave-the-perfect, Dave-who-Mama-claimed-could-do-no-wrong hasn’t been around for years. Malika didn’t think
     to make up any rules about sons not being able to disappear.”
    “He disappeared on purpose, then?”
    “Of course. Who wouldn’t want to get away from that smothering bitch?”
    “But what about you and Habiba? Why did he leave you behind?”
    “Dave and I stopped getting along the minute he brought me to live under this roof. He was as glad to get away from me as
     from his mother, I’m sure. Habiba…that I don’t understand. He adored her.” Briefly her eyes grew soft with some memory, then
     turned hard and angry again. “But if he really adored her, he’d’ve never subjected her to this household, now would he?”
    “I don’t know. What was his reason for living here?”
    “Money, what else? Dave-the-paragon was kicked out of UCLA; he claimed it was grades, but I know it was cheating. I graduated,
     but a degree in English lit and a flair for poetry don’t pay rent or buy food, and it wasn’t in Dave’s scheme of things to
     hold down a job. So we came here. For a while Malika pulled the financial strings and Dave was her little puppet. But then
     he got into something else.”
    “What?”
    Mavis shrugged and went to refill her glass. When she came back she flopped on the chaise. “What did you ask me?”
    “What did your husband get involved in?”
    “Oh, that. I don’t know. By the time I realized he had something going we were living in separate rooms and barely speaking.
     I supposed it was another woman—somebody with money, because all of a sudden he had plenty and was taking absolutely no shit
     off Malika. But if there was somebody, why didn’t he divorce me and take Habiba? Divorce is no big deal in the Muslim community,
     and Malika would’ve made sure he got custody.”
    “How?”
    “By making me out to be an unfit mother. I was already drinking a lot at the time and I’d…had some affairs.”
    “But your husband never mentioned divorce?”
    “No. And then all of a sudden, no Dave.”
    “When did that happen?”
    “February of…ninety. Dave didn’t come home all night. That wasn’t unusual, he stayed away a lot that last year, but he always
     came back in the morning to change clothes. After three days and still no Dave, Malika called in private detectives.”
    “Not the police?”
    “No way.”
    “Do you recall the name of the detective agency?”
    “…No. I don’t know if I was ever told. Frankly, my memory isn’t all that good.”
    “Did the detectives find out anything?”
    “Not that anybody ever said.”
    “Why do you suppose your mother-in-law didn’t want the police involved?”
    “It was too soon after—”
    “After what?”
    “No. That’s got nothing to do with it.”
    “Mavis—”
    She sat up straighter and looked sharply at me. “I’m sorry, why did you say you were here?”
    “To make sure you’re satisfied with the new security arrangements we instituted after the bombing attempt.”
    She frowned. “What bombing attempt?”
    My God. Mavis Hamid was so disconnected from the household that she didn’t know her daughter had nearly been killed the